livin' in the past (easy as the key of c)
by finchily
Summary: Or, the one where the Avengers are a Renaissance recorder choir.


**Dedicated to the rest of my recorder choir. Our soprano is much nicer than Tony.**

* * *

_Twee twee-tweedily eedy, twee twee-e…_

God, they sounded _awful._

Steve lowered his recorder from his lips and cleared his throat. The rest of the team stopped playing and looked at him expectantly.

"Um, well, that was all right for a first run-through," he began, "but, Thor?" The burly drummer glanced up from fiddling with the tension of the drum-head. The tiny instrument looked like a child's toy in his huge hands.

"Since we're just learning this piece," Steve continued, "maybe we could take it a little slower? I know the rhythm's not challenging for you, but we can bring it up to tempo later." Thor nodded, agreeable as ever. Steve turned to Tony Stark, the soprano.

"Tony, unison doesn't mean improvise a harmony." Tony didn't look up his phone, which he had pulled out as soon as Steve started talking. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Sorry, Cap. Things to do, you know how it is." Steve sighed. Tony was incredibly gifted, true, but sometimes it seemed like the group would be better off if he wasn't a member.

"Ren Faire starts in a _week_. I think practicing is a little more important than code for another toy robot or whatever the heck you're doing on there!" Tony waved a hand, still not meeting Steve's eyes.

"It'll be fine. Besides, I don't know why you're complaining. Unison is _boring_. All I did was add a nice little descant and -"

"Clint plays sopranino. Descants are kind of his thing. You're melody." Tony grinned infuriatingly.

"So I broke out of the mold a little. Stereotypes are dangerous things, Cap. You get stuck in a rut and before you know it you're shepherding a bunch of contrary recorder players just because you're not adaptable enough to -"

"Shut it, Stark." Natasha Romanova, the alto player, reached over and tugged Tony's phone out of his hands. "Steve has a point. We need to focus, and right now it seems like you aren't as committed as you should be." Tony scowled.

"I'm committed. Totally." Somehow, Steve wasn't convinced.

"All right, everyone. From the top."

* * *

Steve swabbed out the inside of his tenor recorder before sliding the pieces into their case. He went to pick up the music stand he shared with Bruce, the bass player, only to find that the other man had already put it away and was waiting for him by the door.

"Cut Tony some slack," Bruce said with no preamble.

"I suppose you're going to tell me he's going through a hard time?" Steve tried his best not to sound bitter. The lines around Bruce's mouth softened almost imperceptibly, and Steve supposed he hadn't succeeded.

"I'm saying you are." Bruce stared at his instrument case, unable to meet Steve's eyes. "I mean, you got back what, a few months ago? And everyone knows…"

"About what? About Peggy? Bucky? About crashing a goddamn plane and thinking you're gonna die and then just…" Steve took a deep breath, two, three….

Bruce rested a hand on Steve's arm.

"I could say yeah, we do, but I don't think that's true. Just – it sucks. We get it. But you've been a little…" Bruce paused, searching for the right word. "Irritable, lately."

"I… yeah. I'll try to be more patient." Bruce smiled.

"That's all we're asking. Just try." The two men walked down the hallway and out into the parking lot.

"I'll talk to Tony, though. It's getting to be a problem, when he doesn't pay attention at rehearsal." Steve nodded.

"Yeah. He's got a real gift, I'll give him that, but practice as you'll play, y'know? We can't have the soprano off thinking about God-knows-what half the time." They reached Bruce's car, the sort of hippie van one would expect to find parked outside a co-op at Berkeley, not belonging to a respected local doctor. Bruce swore it had the most comfortable seats in the world.

"Pizza?" Steve glanced across the lot at his motorcycle. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to go back to his dingy little apartment, heat up some leftovers, maybe draw something, maybe head to the gym for a while. He didn't want to talk to anyone. He didn't want to _think._

But he'd promised Bruce he would try.

"Sure," he said quickly, not giving himself time to regret it. Bruce pulled out his phone.

"Great! Let me just…" He sent off a quick text. "Everyone's going to meet at Pelican." Bruce pulled open the van door. Steve slid in, hoping he wouldn't regret it.

* * *

Pelican Pizza didn't claim to make the best pizza in town or any such nonsense, which was good, because no one would have believed them anyway.

Still, the food was filling and the ingredients were mostly identifiable, and it was never too crowded, even on a Saturday night. That made it the hangout of choice for the Avenging Minstrels, a name picked by Clint when everyone was drunk one evening and realized they needed a group name to enter a historical music contest.

They won the contest, absolutely crushing the competition (which consisted of the Spring Hills Retirement Home's baroque chamber orchestra and some teenaged guy with a lute who couldn't even read music. What? It was a local competition). They'd kept the name since, partially for good luck and partially to avoid offending Clint, who lived off the prize money from world-class archery competitions. When the guy said he was training for the Olympics, he wasn't kidding.

His marksmanship ability was probably what made him secure enough in his masculinity that he could play the tiny sopranino recorder. An Olympic-class athlete? Yeah, his manhood could take a few hits.

Steve sat in the corner, chewing his pizza thoughtfully as the others talked. Natasha, a ballet instructor and the person with the best sense of rhythm he'd ever met, was teaching Clint and Tony Russian swear words. They parroted them with varying degrees of accuracy, and Steve fought to smother a laugh. He'd had a Russian-speaking man in the Commandos, and even he would never have said these words for anything short of a nuclear explosion.

God, but he missed them. Sometimes he thought it would have been better if he'd died when the plane crashed, better than waking up in a hospital seven months later to a room full of astonished doctors, better than a life filled with nothing but physical therapy and the clean, high ache of loneliness.

Peggy was seeing someone else, and they wouldn't let him go back to the Howling Commandos.

Rest, Captain Rogers, they told him. You've earned it.

Steve was shaken from his thoughts by a crash from the other end of the table. He stiffened, reaching reflexively for a weapon that was nowhere to be found.

"Hey, Steve, you all right?" Tony peered at him from inches away, his eyes as big and round as a curious child's. They were lovely eyes, whispered some corner of his mind, the thought worming its way past layers of fear and anger and death. Maybe… Steve pushed it away.

"Fine," he replied curtly.

"Like hell you are." Steve blinked, startled, as Tony slid into the seat next to him. "I've got a friend – name's Rhodey, well, James but nobody calls him that – hey, what is it?" Steve stared down at his plate, trying as hard as he could not to think about another James-but-nobody-calls-me-that.

"Fuck, how could I be so stupid? So my friend, he's in the Air Force, right? And he was visiting a few months ago, and he said…" Steve let Tony's babble wash over him. It was strangely comforting, and he found himself thinking about… no.

"So I was thinking, Ren Faire starts in a week, yeah?" Clint planted himself across from them, elbows on the table, hands wrapped around his second beer. Steve made a noncommittal noise. "So we have to think about costumes!"

"We have costumes."

"Yeah, but they don't _match._" Steve sighed.

"For the last time, Clint: no black leather, and no purple anything." Clint shrugged.

"Worth a shot." Next to him, Tony laughed – Steve could practically feel it, like an electric charge in the air.

Across the room, Thor was talking the bored teenager at the cash register into letting him plug his iPod into the speakers to replace the worn-out, decades-old soft rock doing its best to spice up the place. Argument apparently won, he returned to their table with a smile on his face as the pizza parlor filled with the soft, vaguely buzzy sound of a crumhorn choir playing Eastern European folk music.

Never let it be said that the Avengers were not dedicated to their hobby.

* * *

It was two days before the Faire started, and Steve was actually calmer.

Part of it, he was sure, was the inevitability: at this last rehearsal, there were no more chances to make big changes. Sure, they made small adjustments (Steve wondered what the composer had been drinking when he decided to put an A there; any idiot could see it was supposed to be a B flat), but the last rehearsal was mostly a time to drink soda, eat huge quantities of M&Ms, and swap Faire gossip.

"I heard old Suzy isn't coming back this year." Natasha leaned dangerously far back in her chair, absentmindedly tapping out fingerings on her recorder.

"What, really? Is something wrong?" Steve liked Suzy. She gave wildly overpriced tarot card readings with a limited degree of accuracy (as she had once confessed to him, she'd removed the Death card from her deck about a year after she started in the whole business. She said it made people nervous) but she was always good company when you weren't performing. Around the third weekend, when you'd seen all the booths and were getting so tired of the incessant dust and the overpriced sausage that even the corsets weren't thrilling anymore, one of Suzy's crazy stories was just what you needed.

"Oh, she's fine. She married a retired banker and moved to Florida." Natasha grinned. "Charles – you know, the mind reader? He swears she used a love spell on him."

"Must have," put in Clint, "old bat had boobs down to -" Natasha grabbed his wrists before he could finish his hand gesture. "What was that for?" She shrugged before releasing him.

"I like Suzy." Clint scowled, rubbing his wrists.

"Lucky you like me, too, I suppose?"

"No, I just don't want to take out our descant with the Faire starting Saturday."

Steve watched them, sprawling in his chair and feeling far more relaxed than he had in a long time. Beside him, Tony was making notes on his sheet music, which he'd played as written through the entire rehearsal. Clearly, Tony was more committed to the group than he'd shown before, and he'd been far more respectful to Steve. Steve wondered if Clint, Natasha, or Thor had subjected Tony to the same lecture Bruce had given him.

"So how's work?"

"Hmm? Oh, good. Just put the finishing touches on an attempt to keep the touchscreen from getting so buggy when the phone's charging – how about you?" Tony was a programmer for Apple, by all accounts an absolute genius. In his spare time he built robots in his garage that he swore were sentient.

"Oh, you know. Same old, same old."

"Uh-huh." Tony was silent for almost a minute, staring pensively at his sheet music. "Say, Steve?"

"Yeah?"

"Wanna get dinner?"

"You mean we should all go somewhere before Faire? That's a good idea."

"No, just… just you and me." Tony looked… _scared_. There was really no other way to describe it. He looked as though it had taken all of his courage just to ask Steve to… oh. He was asking him on a _date_.

"Oh! Um, I mean, sure. Yeah. That sounds great." Steve could feel his face turning absolutely beet red.

"Great! Do you like Mexican?"

"Mexican's fine." Tony smiled at him, blindingly bright, as though liking Mexican food was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.

"Cool. We can go to Marco's – you know the place, yeah? Doesn't matter, you should ride with me anyway. Hate to break it to you, but that bike's a piece of crap." Steve shrugged. It got him around.

"After rehearsal, then?"

"Awesome!" Tony looked as though he was trying very hard not to pump his fist in the air. Steve bit back a laugh.

"Right." Steve cleared his throat and turned back to the music. "Let's start at measure eighteen…"

* * *

Marco's was good. Steve's burrito was as big around as his arm, and Tony snapped a picture with his phone of Steve struggling to fit the end in his mouth. He uploaded it to Facebook, captioned with a dirty joke, because that's just who Tony was. Steve found he didn't mind at all.

Nobody kissed anyone, and as Steve walked across the parking lot to where he had left his bike he felt strangely disappointed.

* * *

The applause wasn't exactly deafening, but the Avenging Minstrels had successfully provided thirty minutes of background music for the streams of Faire-goers who had happened to wander along the dusty path between the fortune-telling booths and the petting zoo.

They had half an hour free before it was time to do it all again, and Steve was ready for a break.

"Quail?" Tony handed Steve a paper fry boat that smelled appealingly of barbeque sauce.

"Of course." There were foods you could get at Faire that were very, very difficult to find anywhere else, mused Steve, as his teeth met in the delicately seasoned flesh. "Delicious," he mumbled with his mouth full, then swallowed. "Thanks, Tony."

"No prob." Tony took a huge bite out of his corn on the cob. "First weekend, when you still enjoy the food? Priceless."

"M-hmm." They walked in silence for a few minutes, soaking up the strange atmosphere that was so uniquely Faire. Someone tried to sell Steve a tail, and Tony had to fend off an extremely eager frozen banana seller, but eventually they ducked off the path and sat on a hay bale in front of an empty stage.

Tony put his head on Steve's shoulder, and a couple of seconds went by before it occurred to Steve that he should probably do something about it.

For years afterwards, he would swear he had intended to push Tony away.

His body had other ideas.

Gently, Steve rested one large hand on Tony's knee. Tony made a surprised noise and tilted his head up in confusion, the sunlight gilding the edges of his dark hair. He looked like an angel.

Steve had never seen anything quite so beautiful.

First kisses are always a little awkward, and this one was no different. Noses were bumped. Teeth met in very unappealing ways, and when they came up for air a significant amount of barbeque sauce had traveled from Steve's face to Tony's.

"_Oh_," said Steve. Tony smiled, soft and vulnerable and ridiculously cocky all at the same time.

"Like it?" Steve nodded before dipping his head for another kiss.

* * *

"Ten bucks," whispered Charles to Erik as the Avenging Minstrels returned to their places and took out their recorders. Both Steve and Tony looked oddly relaxed, their lips plumper than normal, and they were constantly glancing at each other over the tops of their music stands. Grumbling, Erik pulled out his wallet.

"Fine." Chuckling, Charles took the crisp bill.

"Serves you right for betting against a mind reader."


End file.
